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Feature
REALbasic Plugins
Getting started with the Plugin SDK
Issue: 8.1 (November/December 2009)
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,867
Starting Page Number: 23
RBD Number: 8109
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.realsoftware.com/download/
http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/movies/CreatePluginMac.shtml
http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewforum.php?f=5
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
Getting started with the REALBasic plugin SDK can be difficult. The following article shows you how to get started on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It is based on the presentation from the REALbasic Summit 2009 in Boulder, Colorado.
About plugins
If you compare REALbasic with a car, you can see plug-ins as replacement, extension, or tuning parts. So while REALbasic comes with a lot of built-in stuff, you always find things which are missing. Or you have a function in REALbasic which doesn't work for you and you need a replacement function. Or you need a tuning part to perform a task faster. For example, a picture effect which performs better in optimized C code than in REALbasic code. And in that case you can take a plugin off the shelf or make your own.
There are a few reasons you may have to write a plugin. For example you can embed an existing static library or existing code in C/C++ or Objective-C into a plug-in. Technically you can even embed code from other platforms into your plugin. For example you can compile and link into your plugin code written in Fortran. Another reason to write a plugin is to call operating system functions which are difficult to call from REALbasic. Some calls to COM interfaces or C++ classes are much easier from a plug-in. A third reason may be that you want to use symmetric multi-threading. This is easier to setup and run in a plug-in than in REALbasic code with declares or existing plug-ins.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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